Natural gas compressors are employed in oil and gas production to provide a pressure boost for conveying natural gas along a natural gas aggregation, transport, and distribution network. Natural gas compressors are typically used on-site close to a producing well, and can also be employed at any point in the network between producing wells and the final point of consumption/sale. It is typical for natural gas compressors to be associated with network nodes. Producing wells and aggregation network nodes are often located in geographically remote areas.
Natural gas compressors range in horsepower rating. Mobile or semi-permanent compressors generally vary between one hundred horsepower to over one thousand horsepower. The horsepower rating generally varies with the physical size of the compressor. Scalability issues plague mobile compressors. Mobile compressors having a horsepower rating above five hundred horsepower suffer from disproportionately high maintenance and are found to be unreliable given potential production losses. To date, mobile compressor applications have been limited to short term use as a substitute during semi-permanent compressor maintenance.
In providing high horsepower rating natural gas compression services, generally accepted principles in the art point to the use of semi-permanent installations. In some applications, semi-permanent installations are generally not cost effective for short term or restricted access use, as a lot of specialized equipment and highly skilled personnel has to be brought to, and from, a geographically remote site. Some natural gas production projects are not undertaken or suffer from reduced profitability due to higher site preparation, transportation, installation, teardown and site reclamation costs associated with semi-permanent installations.
There is a need in to mitigate the above-mentioned issues in order to improve operating performance and thereby minimize costs.